Tax return preparation is a document intensive process that requires the gathering of information memorialized on disparate paper documents collected from various sources. Once the relevant data has been located, calculations in consultation with tax tables and related official documents are performed to determine a taxpayer's outstanding surplus or debt to the tax authority. In the field of professional tax preparation, it is rarely the case that an individual taxpayer will initially provide a complete client record containing all the necessary information to her tax preparer. More typically, a tax accountant must determine what information is missing from a client record and follow up with requests to the client, typically made over the phone. Tax preparers often have to make several requests for documents, expending considerable energy trying to obtain the required data. Effort spent in the back and forth between tax preparer and client soliciting and providing information can contribute considerably to the overall headache associated with tax preparation.
The problems associated with incomplete or missing data extend generally tax preparation but to settings where data is exchanged between parties. In financial services, for instance, an applicant for a loan or new account may not have information required by the application form at her immediate disposal, requiring a number of iterations to complete the process. Other information sharing environments including accounting, human resources, legal compliance, and procurement are plagued with similar issues. While some online forms allow users to save records they are working on in order to allow them to provide information in stages, there are no systems for proactively gathering the missing information.
What is needed is a way to automate the identification and retrieval of missing or other needed data.